Stationary Bandit

Quiz of Famous Economists

Here is a quick quiz of famous economists and their contributions.  I finished in 36 seconds.  Maybe I should make it part of the final for my history of economic thought class since they are reading everyone but Becker. I would add questions about John Stuart Mill, Paul Samuelson and F.A. Hayek.  Who would you add? (HT: Marginal Revolution)

Two surprising sentences (at least to me)

Steve Levitt and Roland Fryer write

Indeed, in countries like Bahrain and Iran, which are among the worst in terms of gender equality, girls are actually outperforming boys on math, and this is due to relatively strong performance by girls, not an unusually bad showing among the boys.

And also from the same paper

While of course highly speculative, these cross-country data are consistent with the hypothesis that mixed-gender classrooms are a necessary component for gender inequality to translate into poor female math performance, although it is difficult to distinguish single-sex classrooms from Islamic religion in the data.

Read the whole thing as they find many popular hypotheses without empirical support.  The results, as they say, are speculative but very interesting.  The gender gap in mathematics may arise from the mixed classrooms that alter the incentives for learning.  For some reason, the presence of males in the classroom changes the behavior of females.  Does math proficiency signal something negative about females?  I think that is absurd but anything is possible.  Levitt and Fryer do not offer an explanation but what other plausible explanations are out there?

What does Higher Education Do?

Apparently, it does not include developing basic skills.

More than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.

The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills -- no matter their field of study.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

There was one brightnote.

Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education

Story here.

Another Victory for Homeschooling

A 16-year-old, homeschooled California boy won a premier high school science competition Monday for his innovative approach to an old math problem that could help in the design of airplane wings.

I am not surprised.  Story here.

Search and Seizure Research

Noami Barton, a linguistics professor, writes

A few years back, I asked my undergraduates to read Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone." The class was discussing the effects of the Internet on social interaction, and Putnam's carefully documented analysis of the breakdown of Americans' connections to one another offered a good frame of reference.

The students balked.

Was I aware that the book was 541 pages long? Didn't I know Putnam had written a précis of his argument a couple of years earlier, which they easily found on the Web? Why did they have to slog through so many examples of the same point?

One memorable freshman sagely informed me that people shouldn't be reading entire volumes these days anyway. He had learned from a high school teacher that book authors (presumably fiction excepted) pad their core ideas to make money and that anything worth writing could be expressed in an article of 20 or 30 pages, tops.

I understand her concerns.  I have graded many papers that restate secondary commentary from the web.  It is often clear that the student did not read the primary text which is unfortunate.  Often, criticisms are off point and reflect a poor reading of the text.  They persist because few people know the original. 

This semester I assigned the task of critically assessing the contributions of the "pioneers in development."  For many of the pioneers, summaries and criticisms are available on-line.  Primary texts are available on-line through the university library and are relatively more difficult to obtain. 

I agree with Professor Barton's conclusion:

If we approach the written word primarily through search-and-seizure rather than sustained encounter-and-contemplation, we risk losing a critical element of what it means to be an educated, literate society.

Next week, I will find out if my students engaged in search and seizure at the expense of developing an understanding for the original source. 

How Americans Learn Geography

Patt Morrison informs us that it is not in the classroom. 

Americans tend to learn geography by combat. Who knew from Fallouja? The Mekong Delta? Kosovo? No one, until our guys went in there bearing arms.

The rest of the story is about the Los Angeles River that few people know about.

Sowell on Public Education (A Continuing Series)

From Thomas Sowell's latest column:

E-mail from a reader: "Here is Washington, we are looking at another round of teacher strikes because they want us to pay them more. And the literature they give us explaining their views contains so many errors in grammar and spelling that it really makes you wonder why we pay them at all." 

A Random Thought on the debate over Intelligent Design

The debate over whether intelligent design should be taught in public schools presumes that both the teachers and students understand the theories, stories, and evidence presented by both sides.  I doubt this is true.  Here is the cartoon version of my argument.

Sowell on Public Education

Thomas Sowell, as usual, pinpoints a major reason why public school teachers fail to develop the intellect of the more motivated students:

Let's face it: Most of the teachers in our public schools do not have what it takes to develop high intellectual potential in students. They cannot give students what they don't have themselves.

Here is the whole column.

The Sad State of College Education for Education Majors

For at least a decade, students who intend to major in education have had among the lowest SAT scores of all college-bound seniors - in 2004, they ranked 19th of 22 intended majors, two points in combined verbal and math scores below those who planned to major in agriculture. Even "undecided" ranked higher. And according to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, those who leave the profession during their first few years have higher scores than those who stay. An institute report also shows that the weaker the undergraduate college, the more likely its students will end up teaching as a career.

This is from a fascinating article in today's NYT.  I am not surprised by these results; I have heard about them for a few years.  Thanks to Newmark's Door for the pointer.